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of them. I touched the right one and heard Wordsworth’s voice. “Who be there?”

      I said, “It’s Henry Pulling.”

      “Don know anyone called that name.”

      “I’ve only just left you. I’m Aunt Augusta’s nephew.”

      “Oh, that guy,” the voice said.

      “I left a parcel with you in the kitchen.”

      “You wan it back?”

      “Please, if it’s not too much trouble…”

      Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

      “A brown-paper parcel?” Wordsworth’s voice asked.

      “Yes.”

      “You wan me bring it down right away?”

      “Yes, if it’s not too much…”

      “It’s a bloody lot of trouble,” Wordsworth said. “Stay there.”

      I was prepared to be very cold to him when he brought the parcel, but he opened the street door wearing a friendly grin[25].

      “Thank you,” I said, with as much coldness as I could muster, “for the great trouble you have taken.”

      I noticed that the parcel was no longer sealed. “Has somebody opened this?”

      “Ar jus wan to see what you got there.”

      “You might have asked me.”

      “Why, man,” he said, “you not offended at Wordsworth?”

      “I didn’t like the way you spoke just now.”

      “Man, it’s jus that little mike there. Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one see it’s only old Wordsworth. It’s a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses.

      One day it was the parson come from Saint George’s in the square. An he says in a dear brethren sort of voice, ‘I wonder, Miss Bertram, if I could come up and have a little chat about our bazaar.’ ‘Sure, man,’ ar say, ‘you wearing your dog collar?’ ‘Why, yes,’ he say, ‘of course, who is that?’ ‘Man,’ ar say, ‘you better put on a muzzle too before you go come up here.’”

      “What did he say?”

      “He wen away and never come back. Your auntie laugh like hell when ar told her. But ar didn’t mean him harm. It was just old Wordsworth tempted by that little old mike.”

      “Are you really studying for the London School of Economics?” I asked.

      “Oh, tha’s a joke your auntie makes. Ar was workin at the Grenada Palace. Ar had a uniform. Jus lak a general. She lak ma uniform. She stop an say, ‘Are you the Emperor Jones?’ ‘No, ma’am,’ I say, ‘arm only old Wordsworth.’ ‘Oh,’ she say, ‘thou child of joy, shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy.’ ‘You write that down for me,’ ar say ‘it sound good. Ar like it.’ Ar say it over and over. Ar know it now good lack a hymn.”

      I was a little confused by his garrulity. “Well, Wordsworth,” I said, “thank you for all your trouble and I hope one day I shall see you again.”

      “This here mighty important parcel?”

      “Yes. I suppose it is.”

      “Then ar think you owe a dash to old Wordsworth,” he said.

      “A dash?”

      “A CTC.”

      Remembering what my aunt had told me, I went quickly away.

      Just as I had expected, my new lawn-mower was wet all over: I dried it carefully and oiled the blades before I did anything else. Then I boiled myself two eggs and made a cup of tea for lunch. I had much to think about. Could I accept my aunt’s story and in that case who was my mother? I tried to remember the friends my mother had of her own age, but what was the good of that? The friendship would have been broken before my birth. If indeed she had been only a stepmother to me, did I still want to place her ashes among my dahlias? While I washed up my lunch I was sorely tempted to wash out the urn as well into the sink. It would serve very well for the home-made jam which I was promising myself to make next year – a man in retirement must have his hobbies if he is not to age too fast[26] – and the urn would have looked quite handsome on the tea table. It was a little sombre, but a sombre jar was well suited for damson jelly or for blackberry-and-apple jam. I was seriously tempted, but I remembered how kind my stepmother had been to me in her rather stern way when I was a child, and how could I tell that my aunt was speaking the truth? So I went out into the garden and chose a spot among the dahlias where the plinth could be built.

      Chapter 4

      I was weeding the dahlias, the Polar Beauties and the Golden Leaders and the Requiems, when my telephone began to ring.

      Being unused to the sound which shattered all the peace of my little garden, I assumed that it was a wrong number[27]. I had very few friends, although before my retirement I boasted a great many acquaintances. There were clients who had stayed with me for twenty years, who had known me in the same branch as clerk, cashier and manager, and yet they remained acquaintances. It is rare for a manager to be promoted from the staff of a branch in which he will have to exercise authority, but there were special circumstances in my case. I had been acting manager for nearly a year owing to my predecessor’s illness, and one of my clients was a very important depositor who had taken a fancy to me. He threatened to remove his custom if I did not remain in charge. His name was Sir Alfred Keene: he had made a fortune in cement, and my father having been a builder gave us an interest in common. He would invite me to dinner at least three times a year and he always consulted me on his investments, though he never took my advice. He said it helped him to make up his mind. He had an unmarried daughter called Barbara, who was interested in tatting, which I think she must have given to the church bazaar. She was always very kind to me, and my mother suggested I might pay her attentions, for she would certainly inherit Sir Alfred’s money, but the motive seemed to me a dishonest one and in my case I have never been greatly interested in women. The bank was then my whole life, and now there were my dahlias.

      Unfortunately Sir Alfred died a little before my retirement, and Miss Keene went to South Africa to live. I was intimately concerned, of course, with all her currency difficulties: it was I who wrote to the Bank of England for this permit or that and reminded them constantly that I had received no reply to my letters of the 9th ult.[28]; and on her last night in England, before she caught her boat at Southampton, she asked me to dinner. It was a sad occasion without Sir Alfred, who had been a very jovial man, laughing immoderately even at his own jokes. Miss Keene asked me to look after the drinks and I chose an Amontillado, and for dinner Sir Alfred’s favourite Chambertin. The house was one of those big Southwood mansions surrounded by rhododendron bushes which dripped that night with the steady slow November rain. There was an oil painting of a fishing boat in a storm after Van de Velde over Sir Alfred’s place at the dining-room table, and I expressed the hope that Miss Keene’s voyage would be less turbulent.

      “I have sold the house as it stands with all the furniture,” she told me. “I shall live with second cousins.”

      “Do you know them well?” I asked.

      “I have never seen them,” she said. “They are once removed[29]. We have only exchanged letters. The stamps are like foreign stamps. With no portrait of the Queen.[30]”

      “You will have the sun,” I encouraged her.

      “Do

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